My thanks to Igloo for sponsoring Elezea’s RSS feed this week.
Igloo has some funny new Sandwich videos to lighten your day (and maybe convince your boss and/or IT to upgrade your intranet to something more human). Check them out:
(You can also get a free 30-day trial and bring back Cake Fridays here.)
Jason Fried, co-founder of 37signals, in an interview with The Great Discontent:
People should consider the value of a long-term investment in something. Can you make your idea your life’s work instead of your life’s work being 30 ideas?
I’m more of a fan of constant, steady growth because it feels more sustainable over a long period of time. Creating things that are lasting is what great cultures do. […] What are we creating today that’s going to last for 20, 50, or 100 years? I like to think about that and I’d love to have more people think that way rather than thinking about what they can do for two years until they get bought out.
This is such a good point. We just don’t think about building things that last any more, because that takes time, and we’re not exactly known for our patience. Tangentially related, the recent Radiolab episode called “Speed” is absolutely brilliant — you have to listen to it.
Nick Bilton in Disruptions: Even the Tech Elites Leave Gadgets Behind, an article on the growing (not just hipster any more?) trend to step away from technology every once in a while:
As every aspect of our daily lives has become hyperconnected, some people on the cutting edge of tech are trying their best to push it back a few feet. Keeping their phone in their pocket. Turning off their home Wi-Fi at night or on weekends. And reading books on paper, rather than pixels.
The “phone stack” is becoming increasingly popular as a way to force people to talk to each other over dinner. Sad, but necessary.
Photo credit: Roo Reynolds on Flickr
In Where the Happy Talk About Corporate Culture Is Wrong Cliff Oxford makes the case that there is big difference between Human Resources Happy and High Performance Happy in organizations:
Here’s how I define H.R. Happy: Bosses are at least superficially nice and periodically pretend to be interested in employees as people. These employees can count on birthday-cake celebrations and shallow conversations about what their hobbies are outside of work. This approach allows H.R. people to do the job they love — compliance and regulations — instead of the job they should be doing — finding and recruiting the best available talent.
And the flipside:
High Performance Happy is an attitude with a skill set that says we are on a mission that is bigger than any one of us. We find our happiness in being on a world class team that is making a difference.
I don’t agree with all of Cliff’s advice on how to foster cultures of High Performance Happiness, but the distinction is certainly spot-on. As for how to get to a culture like that, I still think Jocelyn Glei has one of the best summaries in her article What Motivates Us To Do Great Work?:
For creative thinkers, [author Daniel Pink] identifies three key motivators: autonomy (self-directed work), mastery (getting better at stuff), and purpose (serving a greater vision). […]
As creative thinkers, we want to make progress, and we want to move big ideas forward. So, it’s no surprise that the best motivator is being empowered to take action. […] In short, give your team members what they need to thrive, and then get out of the way.
(link via Marcelo Somers)
About a year ago Cennydd Bowles wrote a very good article called A changing tide, in which he thought out loud about the trend of high-profile agency designers joining internal product teams. One of his hypotheses was this:
A great agency is still a strong asset to the industry and its clients, just as a bad agency is still harmful – and there are undoubtedly counter-examples to my evidence. However, one thing is clear: the design industry’s focus is no longer on agencies. It is on products.
He goes further to conclude:
A lot’s been written about the alleged decline of client services, and plenty of people are now rushing to its defence. As always, “it depends” is the only reliable answer; context is the key factor in deciding whether to work for, or hire, external consultants. But I do wonder how the agency world will respond to this shifting community focus. How will they manage to stay an attractive option for designers and organisations who are increasingly internally-focused?
My reason for bringing this up is not to re-ignite the debate over the value of client services. I’ve worked on both sides of the fence. I’m currently on the agency side, but I don’t think I’ll do that for the rest of my career. I think agency-side and product-side design roles stretch one’s skills in different ways, so there’s huge value in both. There are also big downsides to each, of course (for example, product-side can become monotonous, while agency-side can become frustrating when work doesn’t go live).
What I’d like to talk about, instead, is why it suddenly feels like some product-side designers look down on agency designers, as if we’re the body boarders to their cool surfer personas. Here’s David Cole in The Rise of Product Design:
Increasingly the best designers of our time are not working for agencies, but for in-house teams at startups and tech companies. I think this is an important shift, not just for where the work is done, but how the work is done.
Looking back at the ideas espoused by the UX community, I find their relevance to my work winnowing by the year. Many of the practices seem forged in the fires of consultancy.
And here’s Tuhin Kumar in What kind of a designer are you?:
It is not the biggest surprise that some of the finest designers of products happen to work at tech companies and startups. I would argue that a startup or a larger tech company that cares deeply about design (I can definitely attest for Facebook being one) is a better place to bootstrap your career in design than any traditional design agency. There are lot of reasons for this but the biggest and most obvious ones in my head are the breadth of projects and the quick learning curve.
That last sentence is a head-scratcher. I don’t see how one can argue that a designer at an agency doesn’t get much variety. I come from an e-commerce background, but through my agency work I’ve had the privilege of gaining experience in financial services, mobile technologies, and a wide range of consumer products. Plenty of breadth there.
But again, that’s a side note. What I’m confused about is the tone. The subtext that agency designers are not the “best” or “finest” designers. I keep coming back to Cennydd’s article from a year ago, because I think he’s right: there’s been a shift from agency to products. That’s fine (I’ll say it again: I love the product-side and will probably end up there again some day). But we need to be careful about downplaying the role of agencies, and how agencies work.
The other subtext in all these recent posts is that deliverables are for amateurs — real designers create prototypes and ship products. That is absolutely true, and if you’ve found a company like that, more power to you. But it is simply not how the world works for everyone. I’ve said this before, but to make a blanket statement that deliverables are unnecessary ignores the mountain of organizational challenges that need to be overcome in some companies to build useful, usable products. And sure, I’m defending the agency side forcefully here, but I guarantee you that without real deliverables, we wouldn’t get anywhere in some organizations.
Does it make our role less desirable that we have to spend a bit of extra time on “non-design” activities? To those who have found their homes in design-centered companies, yes, definitely. But does it make us second-class citizens in the industry? Yeah, I don’t think so. I’m going to throw it out there that without agencies, we wouldn’t have been in a situation where tons of companies now get the value of design, and therefore fork out tons of cash to make sure they have kick-ass internal design teams. And it’s a pretty awesome feeling when you see that shift happening in an organization, knowing that you’ve had some small hand in it.
So all I’m saying is let’s recognize the inherent value in both sides of the industry, because we all have the same goal: to create great products that delight users and make businesses successful. We’re all in this together.
Nicholas Carr compares two recent Facebook ad campaigns in Home away from Home, and comes to the following conclusion:
What’s really remarkable about “Dinner,” though, is that, in tone and meaning, it’s set in a universe not parallel to that depicted in “The Things That Connect Us” but altogether opposite to it — fiercely opposed to it, in fact. The new ad comes off, disconcertingly, as a sarcastic and dismissive rejoinder to the earlier one: Facebook calling bullshit on itself.
“Our place on this earth”? Doorbells? Bridges? What a load of crap! The earth sucks! Things are boring! People are ugly! Go online and stay online! Chairs, mawkishly celebrated in “The Things That Connect Us” as bulwarks against the meaninglessness of the universe, as concrete means of connection and hence liberation, become in “Dinner” instruments of torture. They trap us in the distasteful world of the flesh, the hell of other people.
It’s an astute observation not just about Facebook, but about advertising in general. How many of the ads we celebrate — yes, even the new iPhone 5 ad — are just fleeting attempts to play on emotions that we find appealing in that instant? The Facebook ad pulls away the curtain to reveal in stark fashion that there is often no thought put into a larger story, an honest portrayal of what a product is and does.
All of this reminds me of the “Bring the love back” campaign from a few years ago:
Sadly — but perhaps as a fitting metaphor for the advertising industry — the bringtheloveback.com domain doesn’t exist any more.
Jumoke Balogun wrote a hard-hitting piece on uneven economic development in Africa Is Rising. Africans Are Not. The conclusion:
I understand that it is much easier to delight in articles and documentaries about a “rising Africa” than to examine personal class privilege. Economic inequality tasks those who have to consider the legitimacy of their wealth; it is an encompassing problem that we cannot donate, aid, or volunteer away. […]
We must all first admit that most Africans are not rising with Africa, and that wealth disparity is a major obstacle to overall development. Not doing so, and choosing to remain intentionally oblivious to the hardships of the majority of Africans who are losers in this new economic landscape is inane, and just downright cruel.
It’s quite chilling to read that article and then read Josh Ellis’s speech at Inspire Las Vegas a couple of months ago:
We call ourselves problem-solvers, but the evidence suggests the problems we want to solve are what are usually referred to as “First World” problems. […]
We are some of the smartest, most empowered humans who have ever lived. We have so much. Can we use our minds, our skills, our resources to make the world a better place for people who never had the opportunities we have? It would cost us so little, and we can accomplish so much.
This kind of thinking has become much more prevalent over the past couple of years, as smartphones and the app economy are reaching some level of maturity. As to why we tend to focus on solving “First World problems”, I like Paul Graham’s concept of “Schlep Blindness” — the inability to identify hard problems to solve:
The most dangerous thing about our dislike of schleps is that much of it is unconscious. Your unconscious won’t even let you see ideas that involve painful schleps. That’s schlep blindness.
But there is much value in identifying and solving the hard problems:
That scariness makes ambitious ideas doubly valuable. In addition to their intrinsic value, they’re like undervalued stocks in the sense that there’s less demand for them among founders. If you pick an ambitious idea, you’ll have less competition, because everyone else will have been frightened off by the challenges involved.
We don’t all have to stop what we’re doing and become social entrepreneurs. But if nothing else, these articles should nudge us to think about how we can move beyond the obvious problems. Instead of building another weather app, how about using weather information to send text messages to people when their area is in danger of flooding? Instead of focusing on providing people with nicer-looking information, what ways are there to help them do something with that information?
One organization that’s doing great work in this space is Praekelt Foundation. For example, TxtAlert sends automated, personalized SMS reminders to patients on chronic medication. MAMA uses mobile technologies to improve the health and lives of mothers in developing nations. Those are the kinds of solutions we need more of.
I remember The Net as if it was yesterday. It’s a pretty laughable movie now, for sure, but back in 1995 it was an exciting and scary look at the future of the Internet. Chris Sims recently wrote a really funny and insightful retrospective of the movie, called What We Learned About Technology From 1995’s The Net. I especially like this part:
Really, though, the movie is more about how the rise of technology impacts our lives, and our changing ideas and concerns about privacy. Bennett was easily seduced by Devlin because he spied on her describing her ideal man in a chat room, and filled in the details by going through her records. As she says, our entire lives are recorded on computers, from our work to our taste in movies. In 1995, this was a shocking problem that people had to learn to deal with. In 2013, it’s basically how Facebook works.
Information that in 1995 required extensive sleuthing performed by clandestine government operations is now freely available to anyone who knows how to type a name into Google. It reminds me of this video (make sure you watch all the way to the end):
Matt Alexander wrote a guest post on 512pixels while Stephen Hackett is away on vacation with his family. It’s called Community, and it really hit home for me:
Perhaps we’re brought together by a foundational love of design or genuinely good products — often embodied by Apple — but I believe we remain, regardless of evolving opinions, because of a visceral sense of community.
I encourage you to read the whole post, as well as Stephen’s letter to his son, which Matt links to at the beginning.
I’ve had a bit of a rough month that gave me a lot of doubts about remaining active in the design industry. But Matt’s post reminded me again that for every bad experience, there are ten examples of people in our community being generous and supporting each other. And maybe it’s time for us to talk about that a bit more, even on our tech-centric sites.
Cap Watkins did it recently, and so did Anil Dash. We need those constant reminders of what Frank Chimero sums up so well in Issue #1 of The Manual:
The web is a technology, but more importantly, it is people all the way down. People constitute and maintain the network. It is widespread and distributed, but it is very delicate. Like a real web, it needs constant maintenance to keep from tearing.
Elliot Hannon nails it in CNN Gets It Wrong — Why We Don’t Really Mind:
If we cared more about journalism than news theater we’d all be watching PBS. But no one’s talking about NewsHour. There are no meltdowns. The circus, itself, becomes the point — the reason to watch. Youtube videos go viral precisely because they are unexpected, unvarnished — embarrassing. This is CNN.
I know I talk about it a lot, but here’s another paragraph from Neil Postman’s 1985 book Amusing Ourselves to Death that could have been written about 24-hour news networks:
Thus, we have here a great loop of impotence: The news elicits from you a variety of opinions about which you can do nothing except to offer them as more news, about which you can do nothing. […]
And a few chapters later:
Our culture’s adjustment to the epistemology of television is by now all but complete; we have so thoroughly accepted its definitions of truth, knowledge, and reality that irrelevance seems to us to be filled with import, and incoherence seems eminently sane. And if some of our institutions seem not to fit the template of the times, why it is they, and not the template, that seem to us disordered and strange.